I came across a claim that the V programming langauge [1] can compile 1.2 million lines of code per second [2]. Then I found out that the code was pretty much just 1,200,000 calls to println('hello world'). Still, I was interested in seeing how GCC (Gnu's Not Unix Compiler Collection) [3] would fare. So I coded up this:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
printf("Hello world!\n");
/* 1,199,998 more calls to printf() */
printf("Hello world!\n");
return 0;
}
which ends up being 33M (Megabyte), and …
[spc]lucy:/tmp>time gcc h.c gcc: Internal error: Segmentation fault (program cc1) Please submit a full bug report. See <URL:http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla> for instructions. real 14m36.527s user 0m40.282s sys 0m17.497s [spc]lucy:/tmp>
Fourteen minutes for GCC (Gnu's Not Unix Compiler Collection) to figure out I didn't have enough memory on the 32-bit system to compile it (and the resulting core file exceeded physical memory by three times). I then tried on a 64-bit system with a bit more memory, and I fared a bit better:
[spc]saltmine:/tmp>time gcc h.c real 7m37.555s user 2m3.000s sys 1m23.353s [spc]saltmine:/tmp>
This time I got a 12M executable in 7½ minutes, which seems a bit long to me for such a simple (but large) program. I mean, Lua was able to compile an 83M script in 6 minutes [4], on the same 32-bit system as above, and that was considered a bug [5]!
But I used GCC, which does some optimizations by default. Perhaps if I try no optimization?
[spc]saltmine:/tmp>time gcc -O0 h.c real 7m6.939s user 2m2.972s sys 1m27.237s [spc]saltmine:/tmp>
Wow. A whole 30 seconds faster. Way to go, GCC! Woot!
[1] https://github.com/vlang/v
[2] https://lobste.rs/s/rh1pbo/v_source_code_released#c_u4dyn7
[4] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-11/msg00463.html